A public lecture by Ayşenur Korkmaz (PhD candidate in European Studies, University of Amsterdam) 2019-2020 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Cosponsored by the USC Institute of Armenian Studies

An ISIS commander. Victims of the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Inmates at Guantanamo Bay. They are among the many subjects portrayed in the work of three women who spoke this week about their experiences as journalists and filmmakers working in conflict zones and with traumatized individuals on a USC Visions & Voices panel jointly organized by USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. 

Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80. USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of about 100 testimonies of survivors from this rampage that killed some 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers includes the vast majority of them. This fall, the Institute reached a milestone: The entire collection of Nanjing testimonies has been indexed and subtitled in English.

In this lecture, 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow Anna Lee discusses the commonalities she discovered in narratives that span decades and continents, as survivors talk about the trauma inflicted on them and the intrusion and violation of safe, protected spaces. She examines the diverse forms of activism described by these survivors and the ways they have employed activism to come to terms with and heal from their traumatic experiences.

Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör (Utrecht University, Department of History, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam) gave a public lecture about the role of paramilitary militias in cases of mass violence, focusing on the example of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. The lecture is based on Professor Üngör’s forthcoming monograph of the same title, which builds upon his broader and comparative research on the global phenomenon of paramilitarism.

 

 

 

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce the publication of a new book entitled New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison, edited by Wolf Gruner and Steve Ross.